Sophie

Hello everyone. I need your advice and help. I shot my very first wedding and I made a ton of mistakes as a rookie photographer. I had "friends" who wanted to use me and I said I had never shot a wedding before. What I guaranteed were 10 fully edited (LR, Photoshop) photos an hour. I would not give them poor quality photos and they agreed to my conditions. I charged them $1200 total. Being that I did not have a DSLR, I spent the money renting a Nikon D800, SB900, and lenses. I wanted to create a contract but they did not want a contract. They would only pay cash. This should have been a red flag for me and I should've backed out. I did receive all of my money but here is what happened. Instead of 10 fully edited photos per hour, I was surprised that I was able to get 20 fully edited photos per hour. Other than this there are a lot of junk photos. Just 6 weeks after the wedding, the groom tonight threatened me. He is demanding every single shot that I took. I do not want to give him the poor quality photos. What should I do. Yes, I know I blew it on many levels but what do I do now. What do the pros agree to when shooting weddings? Do you provide the bride and groom with every single photograph that you shot. I was told not to do this as these photos could come back to haunt me.

This effect is a very common one and is caused by dead or damaged pixels. Pixels may be "stuck on" and a single pixel producing a bright one colour dot or a small group of pixels In images they are often termed "hot pixels. Most sensors have some. They are a common consequence of aging. Some sensors will have them from new, some won't. LCD screens also have them. Software is available to map them and to adjust the image to greatly remove their effect. As a simplistic example, if you had a single "hot pixel" if you averaged the light values in the adjacent pixels and replaced the "stuck" value wit the average value it would be exceeding unlikely to be noticed in the very large majority of images. The algorithms used for correcting them are liable to be more complex than this but this explains the concept well enough. Some cameras have a hot pixel correction function - a long exposure shot is made in 'total darkness' (eg - with lens cap on) and the camera then adjusts for anything it finds in the dark frame. Hot pixels will usually be most obvious in areas where they stand out against the background, and in longer exposure images. "Stuck" pixels are most obvious if they are stuck on - but pixels that are always off will also be encountered. Here's an image showing an always off greem pixel.

It seems to me that Street Photography is moving slowly but surely towards being a collection of joke shots. Lucky captures of peculiar happenings seem to win the awards. But street photography in it's true pure form came about as a way to document everyday life on the street. As Bruce Gilden puts it, it's a street photograph if you can 'smell the street'. With a lot of the photos I'm seeing, labelled as street photography, this is clearly not the case. They are good pictures of odd happenings, but I'm concerned that this style of photography is heading towards and being rewarded for producing gimmicks.